HAVOC

There’s a vitalness to Gareth Evans’ filmmaking that is yet to lose momentum. First felt in 2011’s The Raid, when the film’s compact premise allowed for dizzyingly kinetic fight sequences that all but pinned you to your seat, the writer-director has continued to mine his boundless knowledge of the heroic bloodshed genre in order to fuse frenzied violence with themes of morality.

HAVOC is an extension of his small yet combustible oeuvre. Set over the Christmas period, we find Tom Hardy’s Walker in the dim aisles of a convenience store, trying to scrape together a passable last-minute present for his six-year-old daughter. The actor is a master at playing wounded, war-beaten outliers and wears the role comfortably. Through flashback, we find Walker embroiled in a shady drug operation gone awry. In the present day, he’s tasked with tracking down Charlie (Justin Cornwell), whose disappearance after a botched drug deal of his own puts Walker on the wrong side of a Malaysian crime boss (Yeo Yann Yann). Then there’s his cop buddy Vincent (Timothy Olyphant), adding internal chaos to the mix.

Evans takes a blowtorch to the rulebook, with frenzied, inventive, thrilling choreography...

Evans’ last major outing was the first season of Gangs Of London, a gritty, expansive exploration of inner-city rivalry that has continued for another two instalments. In HAVOC, the plot feels somewhat overstuffed as it strains to cover a similar scale of narrative, with warring factions and constantly shifting motivations piling into a 115-minute runtime.

It also means that the action takes a little while to arrive — but when it does, it lands like a nuclear missile. In recent years, action cinema has become dominated by slick, hyper-stylised set-pieces, with artfully framed shots capturing the mayhem. Evans takes a blowtorch to the rulebook, with frenzied, inventive, thrilling choreography that makes it seem as if his cameras are bouncing off walls and bodies.

There’s also something refreshingly egoless to it; Hardy may have top billing but takes not only many sucker punches to the face but an entire roof to the head. Around him Evans utilities his full cast, throwing greener actors like Quelin Sepulveda, who plays Charlie’s partner Mia, into the eye of the storm, armed with a meat cleaver and a mission to survive. The result is a throbbing, bone-crunching diorama of violence with the occasional horrifying, glorious flourish (you’ll never want to see a fishing harpoon again).

Through Walker’s journey, you can feel Evans’ intention to imbue his film with more heart than we’ve seen before in his work. And it mostly lands, although a more stripped-back ensemble might have helped with his objective. When it comes to his bread-and-blood-splattered-butter, however, few contemporary filmmakers do it better.